The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
Question A — Charpentier's cahiers: are they "meslanges" to which numerous composers contributed?
Return to the introduction to my
Musings about the word "Mélanges"
(This Musing dates from
circa 1995)
Jean Duron raised this question when he discovered that Charpentier's Meslanges contains a setting of a Latin poem by Pierre Portes: the Luctus de morte augustissimæ Mariæ Theresiæ reginæ Galliæ (H. 331) on the death of Queen Marie-Thérèse in 1683. That very same poem— but entitled Canticum lamentationis de morte augustissismæ Mariæ Theresiæ Reginæ Galliæ — was, he observed, set to music by Daniélis for a service in the Queen's memory of the cathedral of Vannes. Daniélis's music has been believed lost. But, reasoning that only one composer would have used Portes's poem, Duron proposed that the Luctus in Charpentier's personal notebooks may be nothing more than a copy of the lost work by Daniélis. In other words, instead of containing purely the works of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the Meslanges could, Duron suggests, prove to be a collection of anonymous compositions, some by Charpentier and others by his contemporaries.
My initial reaction was: "That can't be! It would have been nigh unto impossible, decade after decade, for Charpentier to gain access to the works of other composers within days or weeks of their performance, and then copy those works into his personal notebooks according to a chronology that mirrors so perfectly the activities of the Guise princesses, the Dauphin, the court, the theater." (My Vers une chronologie demonstrates that the watermarks of the various notebooks dissipates all doubts that the two series of notebooks were drafted chronologically and simultaneously.) Skeptical, but driven to test Jean's hypothesis, I consulted the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale, to see just what sort of manuscripts the eighteenth-century royal librarians thought they were buying. As my "Meslanges, Mélanges, Cabinet, Recueil, Ouvrages: L'entrée des manuscrits de Marc-Antoine Charpentier à la Bibliothèque du Roi," shows, the librarians who negotiated the purchase were convinced that these were Charpentier's compositions. In addition, the term "mélanges" does not appear in the Library records until many decades after the composer's death. In other words, the 28 volumes should not be viewed as mélanges, in the modern sense of the word (that is, a volume or volumes to which various authors have contributed), but as "the musical works of the Mr. Charpentier" — which is the term the royal librarians employed in the late 1720s and the 1730s. In sum, the Meslanges can be presumed to contain exclusively manuscripts by Charpentier. I don't know if I convinced Jean Duron that the Luctus of cahier 38 is indeed by Charpentier, but I satisfied myself. I was, however, unable to explain how two composers came to use the poem by Portes during the fall of 1683; so I moved that problem to a mental back burner — but I propose a possible answer in the third part, Question C.
I'd like to conclude with a few thoughts about about what the 18th-century royal librarian may have been thinking when he used the word melanges to Charpentier's manuscripts. Everyone who works on collectors and artists should read chapter 4 of Neil Kenny's The Palace of Secrets (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991)! Kenney shows that, from the Renaissance on, "diversity" and "mixture" (meslange) denoted the complexity of Nature. "Meslange and diversité," observes Kenny on page 137, "are widely used in the Renaissance as generic and stylistic terms. Usually, but not always, they designate writing which is formally and thematically varied, unsystematic, and which, if it is mimetic, represents rather than imitates. One fashionable kind of writing, not normally considered mimetic in the period, is the poetic meslange: a collection, or part of a collection, which includes varied forms and subjects, sometimes in more than one language. Miscellanies too are widely designated by such terms." Kenny then names a dozen publications that contain the works of a single author and that the author himself called either meslanges, "diversities" or "miscellanies"; and he quotes (p. 137) Calepinus's definition of miscellanea and meslanges: "in which diverse matters are discussed in no particular order." Charpentier's autograph manuscripts fit these requirements perfectly: they contain "diverse matters," they are "in no particular order" (the numerical order of the notebooks was disrupted by the binders!), they are in more than one language, and both subject matter and form are extremely varied. In short, in Charpentier's manuscripts the 18th-century librarian recognized a literary genre that happened to be notated in music rather than in letters.
Kenny makes another important point (p. 139): the meslange as a literary genre stands in stark contrast with the cabinet, where the variety of Nature is imitated but in an ordered way — that is, the way two collectors in Charpentier's circle, Brossard and Gaignières, organized their famous cabinets. In sum, by declining to describe Charpentier's manuscripts as a cabinet or a collection, the librarian was stating implicitly that these manuscripts were not the collection of a curieux but were the extremely diverse production of one person — indeed, a production as diverse as Nature itself.